Bill to Squelch Convoluted Left Turns Gains in New Jersey Senate

It is the peculiar fate of the New Jersey driver, as indelible as a shoreside weekend or a Bruce Springsteen composition, if less easily romanticized.

For when the denizens of Mr. Springsteen’s “Born to Run” take their hemi-powered drones for a scream down the boulevard, one detail is perhaps omitted: If ever those renegade drivers resolved to make a left turn, they probably suffered the indignity of taking a right-hand loop first.

The loop is called a jughandle, a traffic formation that looks as it sounds: an unintuitive veer to the far right when you want to turn left.

While other states have been known to use jughandles, none seems to have matched New Jersey in volume or reputation.

“I’m from New Jersey for 60 years,” said Daniel Gaskill, who operates the Princeton Driving School. “Jughandles are part of our culture.”

Officials said construction of the state’s hundreds of jughandles dated to the 1940s and grew as part of an effort to keep traffic clusters off main drags. But like the state’s many traffic circles, the jughandle has become a polarizing force.

The bill’s author, State Senator James Holzapfel of Toms River, described the minutes-long wait at a jughandle as “my personal hell.” Since 2003, when Mr. Holzapfel was an assemblyman, he has introduced a jughandle bill every two years. Monday was the first time his plan passed in a committee. “I’ve sat through three, four changes of the light before I could even get over the highway,” he said. “You sit there and say, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ ”

Photo

One of the state’s “jughandles,” on Route 31 in Clinton Township, N.J.Credit
GeoEye, via Google Earth

Officials with the State Transportation Department are not so sure, suggesting that the alternatives — dedicated turn lanes or mixed-use lanes — leave drivers vulnerable to backups in active travel lanes, including high-speed lanes.

“We, as a department, have found that the jughandle design does serve a purpose,” said Tim Greeley, a department spokesman.

A spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie did not respond to a message seeking the governor’s position on jughandles.

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Some residents have said the greatest shortcoming of the state’s turning policy is its inconsistency. Some stretches include traditional left turns and jughandles in proximity, leaving a left-leaning driver to guess which lane to enter. Mr. Holzapfel noted that roads by the state’s resort towns were particularly problematic to visitors unfamiliar with the convention.

“They go to the intersection, stop, then try to make a left across a three-lane road,” he said.

Mr. Holzapfel said that intersections once plagued with accidents and backups, including some on Routes 1 and 17, had been remedied in recent years with the use of overpasses and other designs that eliminated the need for jughandles. He estimated that jughandles had caused thousands of accidents. (If passed, the bill would affect the future construction of jughandles, not those that are already in place.)

Maria Prato, 31, who moved from Oklahoma City to North Hanover, N.J., in 2007, said it took her about two weeks to figure out how to make a left turn. “I was like: ‘What is wrong with these people? They don’t need to make left-hand turns?’ ” she recalled. “Eventually one of the locals cued us in.”

But perhaps no New Jerseyan has weighed the jughandle’s merits as thoroughly as Jason Didner, 42, a singer and songwriter. Years before he took a job with a highway construction company, he wrote a tune about his driving experience for “Car Talk” on National Public Radio.

“My experience,” he said in a phone interview on Monday, “was seeing a diner on the left-hand lane, and you can’t get there for another 10 minutes.”

And with that, Mr. Didner offered his entry, “You Can’t Get There From Here in Jersey,” and its chorus:

“You can’t get there from here in Jersey/ You’re always on the wrong side of the road/ You can’t get there from here in Jersey/ I’ve got a case of jughandle turnaround overload.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2013, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Bill to Squelch Convoluted Left Turns Gains in New Jersey Senate. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe